Sonic Forces Thread

The concept art for this game really is pretty cool. It's a shame that what we actually got was noticeably less so.

 

That's the case for all games really; I think I have yet to see a game that actually looks better than its concept art.
That doesn't mean Forces fulfilled its potential, but I don't think the concept art have anything to do with it.

 

Cause that worked so well for Sonic 4 right?

calling it gen 2 would have only made people reacts much much worse, "sullying the generations brand" and all that, be glad they didn't take that route, same with 2006

 

The problem with that is that Sonic 4 is an attempt to make homage to very old games years after the fact. It's a very particular concept that's different in nature from Mania and similar to what games like Advance or Heroes did. This is in stark contrast to Forces, which is directly Generations 2 in every imaginable way, to the point where you could get analysts going on about hurting the brand by changing the name all the time. Those analysts would be right here, as many people do actually think the modern Sonic series has an "identity crisis" despite the games being very consistent from Unleashed onward (which is over a decade old now by the way)... simply because they get constant renames. The same thing happened with Need For Speed back in the day... before ProStreet. People tried to do the "identity crisis" thing with Most Wanted and Carbon too, despite those games directly succeeding the Undergrounds to the point you could have stuck the Underground name on them and noone would have noticed.

This is largely the right way to go about it. Contrary to popular belief, there aren't as many bad video games as people think they are. The majority of games have something interesting in them that make them worth playing. We meme about the exceptions now, but they're just that: exceptions. It's not every day that you find some spectacular catastrophe like Sonic 06 or Fallout 76; those are the kinds of things people really remember above all else. And it really requires being a spectacular catastrophe to be such a bad game, as the majority of what people claim to be "bad" about this game or that game is just personal grievances, not really anything wrong with the game itself. I've got so many examples of this, ever heard of Ray Crisis? People dogged that game hard for no good reason, and they kinda still do... because they did back in the day to begin with. That's why this stuff is so important: it carries over, year after year. Very rarely do games ever get "reappraised", either positively or negatively.

In the case of Sonic and certain other series though, these are not just some individuals... there are many of these people, who feel reinforced by all the others "agreeing" with them. Because of the sheer size of this group, we're supposed to believe that their complaints are totally valid and that every employee of Sonic Team does, in fact, deserve to be fired and thrown under a bridge. There are entirely too many people who are invested in seeing other human beings suffer simply because these people got a game they didn't personally like.

I haven't forgotten how Colors, the game everyone supposedly wanted, the one everyone supposedly thinks is the way forward for Sonic, was almost completely ignored by everyone back in its day and still to some extent today. I haven't forgotten how Generations was clearly divided into three groups, one of the very rare instances of actual fracturing in this fanbase: those that worshipped the game as the second coming of Christ, those that hated how it just seemed like a giant rehash, and those that only cared about modding the everloving crap out of it. I haven't forgotten how everyone wrote off the first All-Stars Racing as "just some Mario Kart ripoff", then proceeded to treat Transformed as the game of the gods even though it literally took the first game and bolted on a gimmick pulled straight from a recent Mario Kart title (which Mario Kart 8 repaid in full).

Sometimes I like to think that one day, years down the line, people will look back on games like Heroes and Shadow and Forces, and realize how wrong they were. Then I remember how people like to "carry on" old general opinions simply because they were the general opinion at the time the game came out, and I also remember all the times this has been done with Sonic specifically. Then I just sigh, and hope that at least one person realizes what happened and that they try to do something about it.

Apply this to every series that isn't Sonic, and across many mediums besides just video games. That's getting your hopes up.

 

Is that really true though? Mario games get new names every time, same with Zelda, did that hurt their brand in any way? no, in fact the latest zelda game was the best selling zelda game ever for example, so that is not a valid excuse.

Forces indeed share a lot of elements with Generations, and everyone at the beginning already called it gen 2 , but it is not generations 2 in spirit, as generations was a game to celebrate the series history, almost in a meta way all stages are old stages with remixed music etc, while forces attempt to tell a new story, not directly celebrating the series, sure there are some returning stages, but also the game introduced avatar character as a defining element of the game more than anything.

If names are everything, people wouldn't fall in love with Mania calling it the true successor of classic games, even though it is not names 4 or 5, and Mania actually brought positive reception to the brand both critically and sales-wise.

Meanwhile a game like sonic 4 actually hurt the brand more, if it was named differently as the early development suggests "Sonic the Portable" , people would receive it more favorably as a side game, instead by naming it 4, they devalued the numbered brand, now no one wants a sonic 5, and Mania was called Mania instead when it is a true sequel in every sense, even doing the homages thing to old titles better

Most of everything is bad including videogames, books, movies, etc. there are thousands and thousands of shovelware on steam and mobiles every year, including this death stranding rip-off gem:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1201840/MAN_STANDING/

But i can agree that people sometimes exaggerate how bad a game is especially if it is from an established series, including Forces

Now i hate this kind of revisionist history, how everyone ignored it? i was there when the game released, everyone loved it, everyone was surprised at how it was a focused game and a complete game without any particular thing that bring it down like werehog or treasure hunting for example, most people sang praise for this game, and it sold great at the time, it brought back some missing elements like Super Sonic for normal levels instead of a final boss only thing, and he didn't even do that here! just regular old sonic facing regular old eggman with no super forms or ancient creatures, it was FRESH at the time, like, are you kidding me?

Just the thread from retro alone

https://forums.sonicretro.org/index.php?threads/sonic-colours-out-for-wii-ds.21099/

have 344 pages! That's not a sign of a game that "was almost completely ignored by everyone back in its day", as that is simply and factually wrong and complete bullshit.

 

Oh, so now we suddenly care about what sales supposedly mean and what professional outlets think? Figures.

You can't just name a few exceptions and say "this is totally wrong". Yes, certain series like Mario, Zelda, and Assassin's Creed seem to get a free pass. However, the situation isn't what it looks like with any of those.

In the case of Mario, this actually did happen at least twice. One, people hype up Doki Doki Panic as "the true Super Mario Bros. 2", and even claim it was made by the same people as other Mario games, simply because it was called "Super Mario Bros. 2" at a certain point... despite the reality being that it was actually made by a B-team and originally had nothing to do with Mario (you can't even run in the original Doki Doki Panic); the same applies in reverse for the actual Super Mario Bros. 2, which got renamed as well, of course. Two, you have the people constantly looking for "Super Mario Bros. 4", even though it already exists in the form of World (sometimes explicitly!). The 3D games also tend to have major conceptual differences between them to a degree that individual Sonic subseries typically don't within themselves. Going from 64 to Sunshine to Galaxy to Odyssey is like going from Adventure 1 straight to Secret Rings straight to Colors or something. These are few and far between games that are radically different while still having the same core concept. That's just what happens when one series has more games than another, you get these "generation" systems. That's why Generations even bothered to split Dreamcast and Modern up.

With Zelda, basically none of the games are numbered, not even direct sequels like Majora's Mask and Phantom Hourglass. There are a grand total of two Zelda games that are actually numbered, and I get the feeling one of them (Breath of the Wild 2) will drop that number eventually. The other numbered game was so fundamentally different from any other game in the series that people ignored it had a number at all once ALttP showed up. By the time we got to The Wind Waker, everyone felt that every game was going to be a little different (even though the majority of the 3D ones share clear commonalities like modern Sonic does, such as Skyward Sword being heavily modeled after Twilight Princess).

With Assassin's Creed, each game is such a linear step up that noone actually noticed when they stopped doing numbers. It became "the yearly Assassin's Creed" at some point. That series has what is basically the opposite of an "identity crisis"; it's "too uniform".

Most developers also have this aversion to numbering very long running series after a certain point, possibly as a reaction to yearly series like sports games. This is probably why Sonic Mania didn't get a number. Things like Yakuza or Warriors are a bit exceptional, and Warriors in particular is an absolute headache to follow.

But then you have things like Mortal Kombat, which stopped using its numbers because it turned into a somewhat different console series, then actually got its numbers back (correct numbering and everything) probably for the same reason they were dropped.

As you can see, this is way more complicated than it looks. At the same time, branding is a thing that absolutely gets people. I already mentioned Need For Speed. You've got things like Psycho Fox and Decap Attack. You've even got things like Raiden, despite being a complete knockoff of Toaplan's work, being so popular that it actually caused the subgenre to be renamed "Raiden-like games", and this isn't like what happened with Street Fighter II at all. Sonic's got tons of examples: people treating the Sonic & Tails games differently simply because they didn't retain the original numbering, people treating Heroes and Shadow as anything but followups to the Adventure games, people treating CD as merely some spinoff instead of the alternate "Sonic The Hedgehog 2" concept that it is, people totally ignoring how Sonic Advance was clearly intended to follow the original games even though people also say it actually plays as if it does, and so on. But the biggest has to be Sonic 4, which an alarming number of people have claimed that it wouldn't get nearly as much hate if it hadn't been called that. There are even some very strange people who see S&K as a "Sonic 4" that can stand on its own with that name, despite it simply being an expansion pack to Sonic 3, in stark contrast to the other Mega Drive titles which have some marked differences from each other.

Put aside the Forces thing for a minute: imagine if Sonic Advance was actually called Sonic 4. Just imagine the wildly different world that would be. Imagine all the complaining about "Sonic The Hedgehog 4" being "some GBA game". Imagine how this would have affected Advance 2 and 3, as well as the console games going on at the time. Friendly reminder that Dimps gave people what they wanted long before Mania ever did, and they also did it without having to reuse 2 out of 3 zones, and it has the wildly unique Amy as a playable character. Not a soul will recognize this because it's not called "Sonic The Hedgehog 4".

Then, imagine that Mania was actually called Sonic 5. Just imagine the screaming over Sega validating the Sonic 4 we got. Imagine post after post begging for everyone to boycott Sega over this.

Speaking of Mania, I don't really get how you can claim Forces is somehow "different in spirit" from Generations, but refuse to hold Mania to the same standard.

Steam and the mobile markets are considered to be exceptional, and everyone gets this right now. Things genuinely did not used to be this way, and many do not even consider the majority of mobile games to be real "games" because of this. It's not a terrible mindset, but it invites so much complaining from the people who have their brains hooked up to a hundred different gacha games.

It's not "sometimes", it's often. Look at almost any other platform. There's a reason why these companies actually tried to curate developers back then: it worked. People can get angry about the NES Terminator game or whatever, but a list of so-called "bad" NES games tends to be highly debatable and pales in comparison to a list of so-called "good" games. Even the PlayStation with its ridiculous shovelware outfits like Midas cannot compare to the sheer amount of genuinely good games on those systems. Most people aren't even aware of companies like Midas, either, but it's so easy for them to start naming off Tony Hawk, or Metal Gear Solid, or Final Fantasy, or literally countless other titles. In a single lifetime, it's arguably impossible to play every single good video game across all these curated platforms, as there are simply far too many of them. It is likely possible to play every single bad game in a single lifetime, and that's with the very messy definition of "bad" AVGN-types like to use; there simply aren't that many of these games unless you just hate an entire platform for some twisted reason.

Please actually read that thread, all 344 pages of it. Please don't accuse me of "revisionism" for this, that thread is a total trainwreck. Please also note that the Lost World thread got nearly 200 pages even though noone supposedly cares about it or bought it, and that this thread right here has almost hit the same page count as the Colors thread (and it even still gets posts talking about deals or concept art years after the fact, unlike Colors... which isn't a good thing, by the way, more people should be talking about Colors). Clearly, none of these numbers matter. The community slept on Colors, and the fact that they did was a running joke for years, especially when everyone in the community started complaining about "Wisps in everything". Everyone else, on the other hand, loved it and the game was reviewed well, as things should be. And yes, I'm talking about the main Wii game, not the DS game that the community cares even less about (despite the amazing script and being more or less a sequel to the Rush games that the community supposedly liked... which the community probably would care more about if it was actually called Rush <something>!).

 

hey question why on earth am I expected to read a novel of angry text that isn't about the concept art posted from Sonic Forces

 

When you claim something is the exception, but then you go on to name more examples that proves otherwise it stops being "exception" you know, it didn't harm assassins creed, it didn't harm call of duty, it didn't harm doom, it didn't harm batman movies, it didn't harm bioshock, it didn't harm harry potter books , it didn't harm dragon ball and so on.

Also sonic advance example actually proves my point, the number 4 would have affected it in a bad way, " Sonic main games are gba games now?" , "not even developed by sonic team" -like the real thing later lol- " why it doesn't have the same physics and same level design philosophy?" " why art style is different and uses modern sonic?" , it avoided all that and more simply cause it didn't have 4 in its name and was allowed to stand on it own feet, and was successful enough to have not one, but TWO sequels, something even the real Sonic 4 didn't have and was cut short for its 3rd episode.

And regarding sonic mania, it was a direct follow up to classic games in every way possible while celebrating them and evolve the gameplay, meanwhile forces is regressive in that regard, boost gameplay is dumbed down, levels are dumbed down as well, only similarities to generations boils down to "it has 2 sonics!" . well, unleashed also had 2 sonics, so should generations have been called Unleashed 2? or Maybe 3 if counting colors, and thats not even addressing the fact that avatar was center stage and actually had more levels than classic sonic

Thousand of games are not exceptions and even before that there was simply a lot of bad games i remember playing in GBA and PS1 and others, lot of licensed bad games etc, the sole fact that AVGN have more than hundred fifty episodes and still running proves that there was in fact a lot of bad games

That is revisionism though, i remember clearly that thing called sonic cycle, and how this game broke it at the time



I remember when jim sterling gave it 4, and fanbase was mad at him and SEGA sent him a giant poster in his backyard as a joke

Saying people talk about forces for years unlike colors is disingenuous when :
1- it was only bumped 2 pages ago after only 2 years, and was about concept art not even the proper game
2-Colors have been out for longer, and even then it had new threads after waaaaaaay more that 2 years, you pretending like that thread is all people talked about it

like people cared enough to make mods 5 years after its release

https://forums.sonicretro.org/index.php?threads/sonic-colors-60fps-hack-ntsc-pal.34266/

while forces modding scene is pretty much dead on arrival.

Colors thread isn't even a train wreck -its no sonic 4- , it was filled with good impressions of the game
speaking of sonic 4, its existence and mixed reception made people cares about colors even more, that context is important .
complaints like "wisp are everywhere" are reductive and comes after the fact, there is this thing called saturation, when they first appeared there wasn't a lot of complaints cause it was a new concept at the time, people only complained when they were shoved anywhere even when they don't have a purpose.

So yeah the community cared about colors at the time, i was there, i lived through that time,you could argue that its reception dwindled with years, but at 2010? Nah fam i am calling you out on this bullshit, ask anyone here, actually read the linked thread here, claiming otherwise is pretty much revisionism.

 

I ask everyone to please not take Despatche's bait; don't respond.
Despatche I ask you to please not bring your bait into this thread. Or any other thread in this forum for that matter.

 

Sonic Forces is still a bad game. No amount of autistic rage text will ever change that.

 

Nah, it's okay actually.

 

See this? This is the exact kind of thing I'm talking about. It's literally everywhere and we're all just supposed to accept it as fact by default, whether it is or isn't. It's the same as all those people who repeatedly refer to Sonic 4 as "a broken promise" or "that series we all want to forget" or whatever.

None of this is bait. Why do you think it is? How about the post I just quoted? Is that just "the truth" or whatever?

This entire post is based on the idea that Forces has a "different focus", despite the game itself being massive evidence to the contrary. It's already been well-documented how similar Forces is to Generations, even to degrees people don't actually like, that you don't even need to play the game to understand this. What do you want me to do, tell you to play the game? You're just gonna tell me to do the same thing, which gets us nowhere.

I named examples of how complicated the system is, not "proof" of anything else. All of these situations are wildly different, and some of their branding actually did harm some of the series you've listed.

I'm not just talking about numbers, I'm also talking about how these were developed and also marketed. I'm also not just talking about direct help or harm, but also in how simple branding changes can completely affect someone's perception of a game or series.

Call of Duty stopped making sense to number directly when they decided to make multiple subseries instead. Those have numbers. That system is working as intended.

Doom's branding is all over the place, and Doom 3 calling itself that was a big deal considering how it came years after any of the other games in the series and how wildly different it was from the previous games in every possible way: aesthetic, game design, engine, developer intent, etc.

You can use things besides numbers to denote new entries. Again, sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. Creating a "Batman Returns" as a sequel to a "Batman" that was meant to be a one-off movie makes sense. Unsurprisingly, this is another case where a branding change affects things: "Batman Begins" makes sense as a reboot made many years after the fact, but then it got a sequel called "The Dark Knight". This led to many people actually forgetting Batman Begins even existed and having to be reminded periodically. Obviously, this didn't happen with The Dark Knight Rises.

Bioshock Infinite being called that was a big deal, because it immediately gave everyone some very particular impressions. At first, everyone thought it was a spinoff of some sort. Then, when this was revealed to be untrue, everyone thought it would be wildly different from the previous games. Obviously, now that we've seen Infinite, the latter was the developer's intent.

The main Harry Potter books actually are numbered, and then they each have elaborate subtitles. Long-running book series typically are numbered but also have elaborate names.

This actually did harm Dragon Ball! The original manga that Z was based off of was never called that until the show basically took over everything else (as anime adaptions typically do). At least outside of Japan, Z also lead to the original series basically getting erased from the public consciousness, aside from those small groups that actually did watch the original series first, or that simply never liked Z. Unsurprisingly,, both of these groups are associated with "contrarians", especially when anyone from the former group dares to say they liked the original series more than Z. GT was perceived as a mere spinoff instead of the direct followup to Z: if it had simply been named as if it was just new seasons of Z, or even something like "Z2" or something like that, it would have been received completely differently. Similarly, people were suspicious of things like Kai and Super when they were first revealed, and there are actually many who find Super questionable as a followup to Z. If all of these had just been called "Dragon Ball" like the Z manga originally was, all of these perceptions would be wildly different. People were also very much suspicious of the original Battle of Gods movie at first, because of the long-standing "non-canon" garbage stigma around the movies, which reared its ugly head once again for a while when the new Broly movie got announced.

Which also proves my point, because we're actually agreeing here.

Except for that last bit, which simply isn't true. Far as we know, Sonic 4 did fairly well and continues to do well on Steam and such. Sega staff are on record saying that Episode I did well, and it was hinted that Episode II was given more priority because of this. Sega also repeatedly puts work into making sure people are able to play Episode I and II years down the line, fixing compatibility issues and the like; you wouldn't do that if the games were failures. The reason Episode III was canceled is currently a complete mystery, and it probably has something to do with the outrage more than anything else.

That aside, it doesn't make sense to assume the reaction to Sonic Advance being "Sonic 4" would have been negative. I don't think anyone would have questioned the name as deeply as you assume, as you're coming at this from a 2019 angle. There's context here as well: releasing 2D games on consoles was a big taboo at the time. I would think most people would have thought on this and just taken Sonic 4 being a GBA game in stride, especially since Sonic Advance actually is a good game that people like. Similarly, noone really questioned that the 3DS Sega ports and the mobile versions of Sonic 1 and 2 were the "definitive" way to play those games, despite them being on portables; everyone just wishes they were on PC too, because these days people want everything to be on PC regardless of what it is.

Mania is literally a 3&K rehash. There are a lot of people who dislike it for this, and there are also those who think this is exactly what Mania needs to be, but there isn't really anyone who thinks Mania is some "evolution"... it's not.

Forces isn't regressive. Nothing in the game suggests that Boost or level design was "dumbed down". Just about everything in Forces's framework suggests "Generations 2", it has little to do with "two Sonics" as you've pointed out yourself with Unleashed.

Should Generations have been called Unleashed 2? No, as you said, that would have been Colors if anything, which reuses a lot of the new mechanics introduced in Unleashed. If all of these games had just been called "Unleashed <number>", would that be an issue? If so, how?

It's funny, we're agreeing on the core principles, just not the details around them.

This is starting to get into e-peen territory, but I'm pretty sure I can name more good games for a specific system than anyone could name bad ones for system. Some "bad" games aren't actually bad at all, either because the people who call them bad are lying through their teeth (Zelda II) or the game is being taken completely out of context (Hydlide). The only thing AVGN's show proves is that people want to watch YouTube videos about trashing various video games.

The Sonic Cycle doesn't exist. It's just a great big reinforcement of all the bad memes in this community. So no, this is not revisionism.

Do you have any idea how many Forces-related threads there are around here? I actually counted, there are about as many. Please don't e-peen this too. A pretty good portion of the various Colors threads were just bashing Sonic 4 anyway, there was even a joke topic about it.

There are a lot of great posts in these old threads, by the way. There actually are some people who care about these games and who get that this community is incredibly extreme about some really dumb things.

This is a simple fix mod that fixes an issue with some versions of the game. There are very few Colors mods, and they're all very recent. There are way more mods for Forces. Again, this is just boring e-peen comparing.

I was there too! It was a mess then and it's still a mess now. This "no u" stuff goes nowhere.

 

These last couple pages are some of the funniest shit i've read on the internet for a while.

who would've knew that there is some dude who writes a new bible every time somebody says "forces bad"

(i just think Forces was somewhat functional as a game. but it's some of the most boring ass snooze fest games i've played in my life. i felt nothing when i've beaten it. and the story was laughable. i believe a 16 year old can make a more convincing story than that.)

 

Ugh, at this point I'm just gonna use the ignore button. I don't have the time to read ALL THAT when it's pretty deep into the meta of the actual thread topic, and adds very little to the polite discourse.

 

Eh, I'd say it's more mediocre than okay. But it is certainly not "complete shit" like some people make it out to be, at least in my opinion.